Strange Planet is a bit too strange

polygon.com:

I like candy corn, in that I often forget it exists till it’s directly in front of me and when I have a couple of pieces of it, I smile and enjoy my time with it. However, I know very well that if I ate more than a few bits of it, I would gag on the cloying artificial vanilla-y taste and feel it caulk up my throat and overload my senses.

This is also how I feel about Strange Planet, Nathan Pyle’s webcomic turned animated television show, which works way better in short, sweet bites than it does a whole series.

The webcomic launched in 2019 and quickly became popular. How could it not? It’s about a planet full of blue aliens who participate in many similar activities that human beings do, but they describe said activities in the most specific terminology possible. The general idea is for readers to chuckle as they see their everyday habits as viewed by an outsider to the human experience. Isn’t it funny that tea is basically a hot leaf liquid?

But, as it turns out, watching 25 minutes of these aliens going through the motions of everyday life and explaining what they’re doing by basically reading the dictionary definitions of their activities (and also thesaurus searching for the most complicated synonyms) is not nearly as charming as reading a four-panel webcomic. In fact, at its worst, it’s grating and off-putting.

Strange Planet is as sweet as its webcomic counterpart. And like its webcomic counterpart, that sweetness works best in small doses. If I read a few too many of the Instagram posts in a row, I feel like I’m being baby-talked to, so a full episode length of these cloying niceties that sound like they’re narrated by Young Sheldon comes off as particularly condescending. Some comics deserve a fully-fleshed